HighPoly To LowPoly Modeling

GodfishB16

Hey guys,

I'm currently a student in school right now, I won't mention the school but right now we are working on a character modeling project. My school hired a new teacher and he seems to be stuck in the 1990s I think. He doesn't seem to understand the importance of the newer high poly modeling work flow. I'm working on throwing together a document that showcases some professional work and quotes of from artists such as the people that post on these forums.

What I wanted to know is could some of you guys give me some more insight on the work flow from creating the high poly model to the Low poly ingame model?

How has this changed the way games look? Would you ever want to go back to hand painting all the detail?

Thanks guys

-C

MoP

An admirable plan, I wish you luck getting this presented to the teacher (maybe try to give it as a presentation to the whole class if you can). In my experience it can be very hard to change things like this, especially when there's a curriculum that's been set and probably won't change for that school year.

Here's a great run-down of some next-gen techniques by Masakari.

This has changed the way games look by allowing lighting to be fully dynamic over a detailed model, so instead of painted static highlights and shadows, you can have a much more realistic surface approximation by combining diffuse, normals and specular maps to mimic real-world surfaces.

Regarding "woudl you ever want to go back to hand painting", it's a different question now - while in the past you had to hand paint or photosource everything, nowadays you have the option of how to approach different styles.
For example, the recent Warcraft games (Warcraft 3, World of Warcraft) have a very vibrant, distinctive and cool style due to all their handpainted textures. They could have used normal-maps or other methods, but the art style demanded a hand-painted approach, and it really paid off.

Similarly games like Braid or Fat Princess have really unique looks mainly due to their hand painted textures.

Obviously you can use normal-maps to get a stylised look too, but this is slightly different to the hand-painted style you can still find in many modern games.

GodfishB16

Thanks for the Reply Mop! Yeah I'm not sure if this will change anything this semester, but hopefully it will shape the major overall.

and yes I will agree that games like WoW and Braid really play with this a lot. Its what makes their game look and feel the way they do and is really a breath of fresh air in a market full of realistic titles, not that I don't enjoy them.

But I guess another question would be, do you feel that games like Gears of War (1 and 2), Rainbow 6, and The Call of Duty series would have looked the way they do without the process of High to lowpoly modeling and texture baking?

MoP

In response to your last question: Absolutely not, in fact I would say that especially in Epic's case (GoW, GoW2, UT3), the highpoly modelling and the amount of detail they get out of normal-mapping is one of the key things defining the style of those games. There's no way you could make a game that looks like that without using highpoly modelling and normal-maps.

Call of Duty slightly less so - they do use highpoly modelling quite effectively for their characters, but it doesn't seem to be used as much on the environments and weapons. A lot of Infinity Ward's environment and weapon textures are heavily photo-sourced with simpler normal-maps generated from heightmaps or textures rather than lots of high-poly modelling. Not sure if this will be the case for Modern Warfare 2 but it definitely was for CoD4.

I would say that studios like id Software and Epic are the poster children for high-poly and normalmapping workflows - they've been breaking new ground and pushing the tech forward for the past 5 years at least (since the development and release of Doom 3).

GodfishB16

Yeah epic has definitely been breaking ground with visuals. and IDs new engine looks incredible, the lighting is breath taking, the same goes for epics new updates to Unreal.

So as for Activision on CoD4 u think they are mainly generating most of their environment art from highly detailed texture painting that has been thrown into crazy bump or something? Just curious as to what other software is out there for doing this. Or some other insight on the workflow.

Also going back to the Masakari article there is some really good stuff. When he is refering to smooth groups he is refering to normals being hard or soft, right? So hes mainly saying that in order to get good bakes u need to just keep everything smoothed?